Looking forward to OER15!

Clearing the post-Christmas mail backlog is always a bit of a chore, but it was well worth it to find two emails from the OER15 committee saying the papers I submitted have been accepted for this year’s conference, which is taking place in Cardiff in April. I’ve had a paper at all but one of the OER conferences since they kicked off in 2010, though I believe John Robertson was on presenting duties first time round. OER is one of my favourite conferences and it’s been great to see it going from strength to strength, particularly when many predicted its demise after the UKOER programme came to an end in 2012. The programmes are always engaging and eclectic and it’s been encouraging to see international participation growing over the years. It’s fitting that the conference should be held in Wales this year as there have been some really positive open education initiatives developing there over the last few years including the 2013 Wales Open Education Declaration of Intent, the launch of OER Wales Cymru and the publication of the Welsh Government’s report Open and Online: Wales, higher education and emerging modes of learning.  I’m really looking forward to going to Cardiff as it’s a city I’ve never visited, but I also can’t help hoping that one of the next OER conferences can be held in Scotland!

This year I’ll be presenting one full paper on behalf of the Open Scotland initiative, and one short paper about the work of the Open Policy Network with Nicole Allen of SPARC and Cable Green of Creative Commons.

Common Ground – an overview of the open education landscape in Scotland.
Author: Lorna M. Campbell

The profile of open education in Scotland has risen significantly over the last year and open education initiatives have increased across all Scottish education sectors. Such is the profile of open education that, in their State of the Commons report, Creative Commons named Scotland among fourteen nations that have made national commitments to open education, through legislation or projects that lead to the creation, increased use or improvement of OER.

This paper will present an overview of the open education landscape in Scotland, focusing on significant policy and practice advances and identifying some of the drivers that have influenced these developments.

MOOCs continue to have an impact in HE, however a number of universities are broadening the scope of their engagement with open education and are increasingly looking to embed open policy and practice across the institution.   Building on the success of their MOOCs and the steady maturing of technology, the University of Edinburgh has committed to scaling up their open education offering and pledged to make openness a core part of their business. At Glasgow Caledonian University, open education developments have been lead by the library, where staff have developed OER guidelines, which are being incorporated into formal institutional policies.

There has been less progress in further education; the sector has undergone a significant period of turmoil resulting from the process of regionalisation and the promising Re:Source OER repository initially failed to gain traction. With the majority of structural changes in now in place and new appointments to the sector’s supporting bodies, it is to be hoped that colleges will reengage with open education, resulting in a resurgence of interest in OER and increased adoption of Re:Source.

Open education has yet to have a significant impact on the school sector, however there is growing awareness of the value of OER and encouraging open education practice in schools. GLOW, the Scottish schools national intranet aspires to move towards increased openness and to encourage teachers to become open educators.

Although there has been no open funding call comparable to HEFCE’s UKOER Programme, in 2014, the SFC allocated £1.27 million to the Open University to establish the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland project, which aims to facilitate best practice in open education in Scotland.

Open Scotland, the cross-sector collaborative initiative launched by Cetis, SQA, ALT and Jisc RSC Scotland in 2013 continues to engage with all of these sectors and initiatives and with international bodies including the Open Policy Network, the Open Education Consortium, Wikimedia Foundation and Open Knowledge, to raise awareness of open education and promote the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education.  In late 2014 Open Scotland launched the second draft of the influential Scottish Open Education Declaration incorporating input from colleagues across the sector.

Education in Scotland is widely regarded as a shared common good, and open educators are increasingly coming together to share their experience of open education policy and practice in order to benefit the sector as a whole.

Open Education and the Broader Open Policy Environment
Authors: Nicole Allen, Cable Green, Lorna M. Campbell

Governments (and education institutions) around the world generate huge amounts of publicly funded research, data, and educational materials. Open policies, or policies that require open licenses for publicity funded resources, can maximize the impact of public investments and support open education by enabling the use and re-use of these valuable resources.

Join members of the Open Policy Network (OPN) — a newly launched coalition of organizations and individuals working to support the creation, adoption, and implementation of open policies across the world — for a discussion about some of the latest trends in open policy and how it relates to open education. Also learn about how the OPN is actively working to support open policy efforts and how you can get involved. More information about OPN is available at https://openpolicynetwork.org.

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